Re:ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview
by omginternets on Sunday February 07, 2016 @02:10PM
(#11054252)
>Just giving up on money laundering isn't something most people are willing to think about, particular for an experimental payment system that they don't care about and probably won't use.
But nobody is actually advocating this, least of all me. The argument is that tracking every financial transaction is no longer viable, whether we like it or not.
Moreover, digging your heels into the sand and saying "but it's not right to give up on money-laundering" doesn't change the reality: there exists technology that makes arbitrary, anonymous payments trivial to perform. What do you propose we do?
This is binary thinking but crime isn't binary. There are varying levels of crime. New technologies can make criminal behavior easier or more difficult. Just giving up on money laundering isn't something most people are willing to think about, particular for an experimental payment system that they don't care about and probably won't use.
For someone who doesn't understand the benefits of a new technology and is rounding it to zero, the cost/benefit tradeoff isn't hard to decide, and making an analogy to splitting the atom is unlikely to be persuasive.